This module provides aliases for the built-in variables whose names no one seems to like to read. Variables with side-effects which get triggered just by accessing them (like $0) will still be affected.

For those variables that have an awk version, both long and short English alternatives are provided. For example, the $/ variable can be referred to either $RS or $INPUT_RECORD_SEPARATOR if you are using the English module.

This module can provoke sizeable inefficiencies for regular expressions, due to unfortunate implementation details. If performance matters in your application and you don't need $PREMATCH, $MATCH, or $POSTMATCH, try doing

use English qw( -no_match_vars ) ;

. It is especially important to do this in modules to avoid penalizing all applications which use them.